Questions about environment backups and restoring them

[VilPel]

Hello community,

I am still quite new to managing environments backups and restoring them but I would like to learn more about them. Microsoft has a good documentation regarding it but I still have a couple of questions to be solved.

Question #1: How many manual backups can I take per environment?

I created my first manual backup of a production environment today but the system allowed me to create another one in the platform. I read that these backups don't consume the tenant capacity but I was wondering if there is a limit...

Question #2: Is it possible to automate system backups?

In this case we'd be talking about automating manual backups. Currently my production environment only allows to restore automatically created system backups from past 7 days because I don't have any D365 apps in it. Is there a connector in Power Automate or any other way to automate system backups in Power Platform?

Question #3: Is it possible to move backups from one environment to another?

This is maybe a bit far-fetched questions but would be super helpful if possible. Let's say that in one of our own production environments we create a great content structure in our Power App so that a new user does not arrive to an empty application when they start using it. In this case there would be records in the database with some ownerships saved for them. Could we create a backup of this environment and "move" it to an empty environment so that the content is already there when the new environment's users open the app? Would this be possible across tenants?

Question #4: Are there any 3rd party backup systems for Power Platform / Dataverse?

If the backup and restoring options offered by Power Platform do not serve our needs, does there happen to be any 3rd party backup systems that would allow to store backups longer than 7 days?

Thank you for reading my questions!

Ville

[ChrisPiasecki · Accepted solution]

Hi @VilPel ,

1. There is no limit to the number of manual backups you can take. They are retained for 7 days. More detail documented here.
2. System backups are already taken for you. Full backups are taken weekly, differential backups either every 12/24 hours, and transaction log backups every 10 minutes. More details documented here.
3. You can restore a backup to a different sandbox environment within the same region the backup was taken. The backups come across with it. You'd need to open a Microsoft support ticket to migrate an environment to a different geo/tenant.
4. Microsoft manages the backups and you cannot download a copy of the backup. I'm not aware of 3rd party tools that back up the environment. You could do this yourself by ensuring the customizations are backed up (they should be in source control), and for the data you can use the out of box Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse to backup your data to a data lake/synapse analytics workspace. Or you could use your own methods to export the data you want for backup purposes.

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[Mark_French]

Hi there, 

If I had an instance where I accidently deleted some tables from Dataverse, Is there a way I can restore just those tables I have lost - so think a more targeted table restore solution.. rather than full environment restore?

Would appreciate the advice,

Thank you

[pabloperalta]

Hi Mark,

That would be ideal, but unfortunately, there's no option for doing that.

The only way would be to restore a previous backup.

A potential OOB alternative, so you at least avoid losing data, could be configuring synapse link in append only mode, so you always have a copy of your data.

Hope that helps.

Pablo.